The free Iconix application integrates into many popular mail clients in order to call out those messages which have been verified as sent by one of a list of over 1500 senders includingobviouslyPayPal, banks, credit card companies, major retailers, and other popular sites like Monster.com and The New York Times.

The verification is based on existing e-mail authentication standards; Iconix says they use "...technologies like DKIM, Domain Keys and Sender ID...", all of which DNS-based services and special mail headers to confirm that a particular message was actually sent by the e-mail domain it purports to come from.

In the nearby example, a message from Facebook has been confirmed as coming from Facebook. Click on the special icon for that message in your e-mail client and this verification box pops up.

DKIM is DomainKeys Identified Mail, a standard established many years ago and led by Yahoo! and Cisco. It uses public key encryption to prove not only that the message sender is authenticated, but that it has not been modified in transit.

Any mail domain can implement these standards, but Iconix is only verifying particular ones. This is good because a sender is not trustworthy just because they are verified. So Iconix is picking only trustworthy senders.

It's a shame that e-mail clients need an add-in to display this information. Standards exist for mail clients to interact with 3rd party verification/accreditation services, such as Iconix, so that the client could implement this capability natively. Thus far, to my knowledge, only webmail clients do this.

Larry Seltzer has been writing software for and English about computers ever sincemuch to his own amazementhe graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1983.
He was one of the authors of NPL and NPL-R, fourth-generation languages for microcomputers by the now-defunct DeskTop Software Corporation. (Larry is sad to find absolutely no hits on any of these +products on Google.) His work at Desktop Software included programming the UCSD p-System, a virtual machine-based operating system with portable binaries that pre-dated Java by more than 10 years.
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